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ok, thats badass.
Ok, just when I was kinda getting tired of hearing about Wikileaks, down the pike comes a whole load of new crap.
In a rare interview, Assange tells Forbes that the release of Pentagon and State Department do ents are just the beginning. His next target: big business.
Early next year, Julian Assange says, a major American bank will suddenly find itself turned inside out. Tens of thousands of its internal do ents will be exposed on Wikileaks.org with no polite requests for executives’ response or other forewarnings. The data dump will lay bare the finance firm’s secrets on the Web for every customer, every compe or, every regulator to examine and pass judgment on.
(For the full transcript of Forbes’ interview with Assange click here.)
When? Which bank? What do ents? Cagey as always, Assange won’t say, so his claim is impossible to verify. But he has always followed through on his threats. Sitting for a rare interview in a London garden flat on a rainy November day, he compares what he is ready to unleash to the damning e-mails that poured out of the Enron trial: a comprehensive vivisection of corporate bad behavior. “You could call it the ecosystem of corruption,” he says, refusing to characterize the coming release in more detail. “But it’s also all the regular decision making that turns a blind eye to and supports unethical practices: the oversight that’s not done, the priorities of executives, how they think they’re fulfilling their own self-interest.”
This is Assange: a moral ideologue, a champion of openness, a control freak. He pauses to think—a process that occasionally puts our conversation on hold for awkwardly long interludes. The slim 39-year-old WikiLuck_The_Fakers_Leaks founder wears a navy suit over his 6-foot-2 frame, and his once shaggy white hair, recently dyed brown, has been cropped to a sandy patchwork of blonde and tan. He says he colors it when he’s “being tracked.”
“These big-package releases. There should be a cute name for them,” he says, then pauses again.
“Megaleaks?” I suggest, trying to move things along.
“Yes, that’s good—megaleaks.” His voice is a hoarse, Aussie-tinged baritone. As a teenage hacker in Melbourne its pitch helped him impersonate IT staff to trick companies’ employees into revealing their passwords over the phone, and today it’s deeper still after a recent bout of flu. “These megaleaks . . . they’re an important phenomenon. And they’re only going to increase.”
He’ll see to that. By the time you’re reading this another giant dump of classified U.S. do ents may well be public. Assange refused to discuss the leak at the time FORBES went to press, but he claims it is part of a series that will have the greatest impact of any WikiLeaks release yet. Assange calls the shots: choosing the media outlets that splash his exposés, holding them to a strict embargo, running the leaks simultaneously on his site. Past megaleaks from his information insurgency over the last year have included 76,000 secret Afghan war do ents and another trove of 392,000 files from the Iraq war. Those data explosions, the largest classified military security breaches in history, have roused antiwar activists and enraged the Pentagon.
Admire Assange or revile him, he is the prophet of a coming age of involuntary transparency. Having exposed military misconduct on a grand scale, he is now gunning for corporate America. Does Assange have unpublished, damaging do ents on pharmaceutical companies? Yes, he says. Finance? Yes, many more than the single bank scandal we’ve been discussing. Energy? Plenty, on everything from BP to an Albanian oil firm that he says attempted to sabotage its compe ors’ wells. Like informational IEDs, these damaging revelations can be detonated at will.
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Read the rest of the article at the following links, in order (each link is one page of article) the entirety of it is VERY interesting.
http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenber...ate-secrets/2/
http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenber...ate-secrets/3/
http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenber...ate-secrets/4/
http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenber...ate-secrets/5/
http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenber...ate-secrets/6/
http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenber...ate-secrets/7/
ok, thats badass.
(speculation is that the bank is Bank of America) --heard this from an investement manager I know who follows these things as well.
Apparently Assange did an interview a while back where he said they had a bunch of BoA do ents.
I hope the guy is right.Leaks merely lubricate the free market, he says, settling into the couch and clearly enjoying giving me a lecture on economics. (Later, as a 45-minute interview pushes into two hours, he ignores his handler, who keeps urging him to leave for his next appointment.) He cites the example of the Chinese Sanlu Group, whose milk powder contained toxic melamine in 2008. While poisoning its customers, Sanlu also gained an advantage over compe ors and might have forced more of them to taint their products, too, or go bankrupt—if Sanlu hadn’t been exposed in the Chinese press. “In the struggle between open and honest companies and dishonest and closed companies, we’re creating a tremendous reputational tax on the unethical companies,” he says.
Of course, Assange’s tax isn’t as equitable as it sounds. He alone decides where to apply the penalty, choosing the targets and when to expose them with a touch of theatrical grandstanding—and with zero accountability. For better—and worse—WikiLeaks has become the Julian Assange Show. As a photographer begins shooting, Assange wonders aloud if the coat he’s wearing might have been produced by a labor-exploiting company. A few minutes later he jokes about his “messiah complex.”
Like any true believer, Assange sees his work in simple terms. Markets, he reminds me, can’t exist without information. Business will come to appreciate what he offers. And if that requires a few painful scandals in the process?
Assange doesn’t miss a beat. “Pain for the guilty.”
it will be unfortunate when companies learn they can over their compe ion by carefully forging leaks about their opponents.
capitalism!
BofA's `Sloppy' Prime Mortgages Add to Pressure for Buybacks
Bank of America Corp., battling demands for almost $13 billion of refunds from mortgage investors, reported that the fastest-growing group of claims involves loans to people with the best credit scores.
Claims for refunds on prime mortgages surged 150 percent to $3.6 billion in the first nine months of 2010, the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank said last month in its quarterly report. Claims on subprime loans, made to borrowers deemed more likely to default, were little changed at $579 million. Mortgage investors can demand refunds from a bank if a loan was based on faulty data about the home or borrower.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/print/...-buybacks.html
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Now if Fannie and Freddie (aka us taxpayers) would "cram back down the throats" of mortgage sellers all the toxic mortgages dumped on F&F, we might make some progress.
Magic Negro doesn't have the balls.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 12-01-2010 at 05:30 PM.
what exactly makes you think companies couldn't do that already?
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